04.02.2016
How to leave your kid in a pub
The government’s latest attempt to pretend it knows a thing or two about children is laughable, says Commissaress
Who would be qualified to tell people that they are not being good parents? Maybe a child psychologist or therapist. Maybe someone who loves a child - a relative, a friend or even a teacher - and who has observed unhappiness, a lack of confidence and/or a change in behaviour. Maybe a child themself: no-one knows their own circumstances better than they themselves do - even if sometimes they cannot or do not want to express their knowledge.
At any rate, if someone wants to judge others on the quality of their parenting, you would expect them to display some signs of - you know - actually caring about children and young people. They would probably not be making what seems like a deliberate attempt to jeopardise the future of over 10 million children by slashing the funding of children’s centres and libraries, tax credits for families and affordable housing schemes, making education both more expensive and - thanks to the incoherent reforms - of a worse quality. Yet this is exactly what the Conservative government is managing to do and, even more remarkably, it is managing to do it with a straight face and plenty of moralising rhetoric.
Last month a plan called the Life Chances Strategy (I am not quite sure how to translate this from Newspeak) was unveiled, which will “include a plan for significantly expanding parenting provision” and “examine the possible introduction of a voucher scheme for parenting classes and recommend the best way to incentivise parents to take them up” in order to “make it normal - even aspirational - to attend parenting classes”.1 This is not the first attempt by the Conservatives to set up a parenting classes scheme: in 2011, the CANParent scheme completely flopped after just 2% of eligible parents signed up,2 but apparently the issue of ‘bad parenting’ is so serious that we need a ‘CANParent take 2’. Which is somehow going to be more successful this time round.
Ironically, I do think that the government has identified a real problem here. ‘Bad parenting’ is incredibly hard to define, since there are, of course, no objective criteria determining what the task of parenting and its successful completion requires, no matter how much bureaucrats and authors of parenting guides want there to be some. But, when mental health problems amongst youth are rife,3 when over 50,000 children in the UK have been identified as needing protection from abuse and neglect, and when, for every child identified, eight more are suspected to be suffering,4 you know something is going wrong. In addition, researchers at Kansas University found astonishing disparities between the knowledge and communication abilities of poorer and richer children, which could be traced back to parenting.5
These very obvious problems, however, are not what I want to discuss, because most people are aware of the damage inflicted upon children and their lives as a result of such factors. Parenting which causes stress, unhappiness or ill health (physical or mental) and produces children with low confidence, an unquestioning attitude and a lack of passion is much more prevalent than physical or sexual abuse, mental illness or anything of the sort - but not enough people are talking about it. It is not only the worse-off parents - those more likely to leave their children in front of the TV, feed them junk food, order them around and not give them much in the way of intellectual stimulation (see Annette Lareau’s Unequal childhoods) - who are guilty of this sort of parenting, despite being the more talked-about perpetrators of it.
Every autumn, I have the, um, pleasure of witnessing the middle class madness known as the 11-plus exam season - a period epitomising the style of parenting exclusive to affluent families, which Lareau termed “concerted cultivation”. It involves months of organised preparation for the 11-plus application process, combined with steadily increasing parental stress over whether their little pumpkin is going to be admitted through the Gates of Heaven - I mean, admitted to an independent or grammar school. This kind of parenting may be sufficient for the purpose of passing a few exams, but it causes a lot of needless stress and tends to produce children, like many of my peers, who cannot really think independently and have no flair or passion for anything. So it seems that very few children of any income bracket emerge unscathed from the process of parenting. This is a problem.
Root causes
Indeed, it is such an important problem that, as with phenomena like wars, poverty and anti-social acts, we cannot afford to make the usual liberal mistake of attributing it to individual ‘bad parents’ rather than to endemic social problems. Such abstraction of individuals from the causes and conditions of their behaviour will inevitably cause unwarranted blame-placing and failure to address the root causes of the problem at hand, which is why under capitalism we so often see the same mistakes being made over and over again. In the case of ‘bad parenting’, the mountain of research done into its causes (I gave a couple of examples earlier in the article) has made the roots of the problem and what we need to do to solve it very clear.
Parenting styles and their shortcomings are hugely dependent on social class and can be traced back to the general outlook of a certain class: for instance, ‘aspirational’ members of the middle class are more likely to cultivate the same sort of outlook in their children, as Lareau found. Furthermore, class disparities cause enormous disparities in knowledge. In this way, the root cause of ‘bad parenting’ lies in class society, and in institutions like the family which serve to perpetuate class disparities. It follows that the best way to remove ‘bad parenting’ would be to eliminate the poverty - and the wealth - which causes it, and transition into a system in which children are socially raised, so that disparities between families are not inherited by the next generation and all children can grow up free, surrounded by intellectual stimulation and a network of supportive people. But no self-respecting minister would ever be caught saying that, because the last thing the government wants to do is blaspheme against the holy family. Regardless of the obvious damage it causes.
Parenting classes are an attempt to socialise child-rearing and reduce disparities a little bit without committing such blasphemy. Even so, any attempt by a western government to do anything which reduces the family’s role would predictably bring the individualists crawling out of the woodwork, making the usual complaints about erosion of the sacred parent-child relationship, individual freedom and the ideals which Made Our Country Great™. This sort of individualist criticism will probably make up the bulk of the opposition to the Life Chances Strategy.
But it is a ridiculous criticism. There is nothing wrong in principle with greater socialisation of childcare - except the fact that it goes against bourgeois dogma. The problem with parenting classes is that ‘teaching’ some kind of parenting strategy will not address the root cause of ‘bad parenting’ and, moreover, that the state does not seem at all qualified to tell parents how to raise children, when it is not doing such a great job of raising children itself. The latest Children’s Society report on children’s subjective well-being found that many were more satisfied with their home life than with their school life.6
I for one hate being forced to waste my youth at the intellectual prison that is school, and I know very few people who actually enjoy it. In primary schools in particular: food is unhealthy, water fountains do not work and very little is actually learnt (just ask my brother), but uppity teachers and council bureaucrats still have the audacity to tell parents what to do, inspect children’s lunches and propose fines for parents who take their children on holiday during term time - even during the last week, which is often spent watching Disney movies. Evidently, all the controls and restrictions, the bombast about creating a positive learning environment and the tangled web of bureaucracy employed in managing a state school have failed to produce anything but a moralistic, intellectually strangling hellhole. In what universe should the state which produced this spectacular mess be trusted with children?
The flaws of the education system and the reasons behind them are a topic for another article (or, more likely, a tome), but I think part of the reason why that system is failing and why any set strategy for parenting is a bad idea is that there are too many rules. People almost instinctively need to feel as though they are doing things ‘right’, and the parenting manual industry has made a fortune by providing puzzled parents with a set formula for raising children: a formula involving fruit-and-veg pirate ships, behaviour charts with gold stars and Mandarin hypnopaedia. Although this formula was created by yummy mummies in a conference room for the sole purpose of profiting from parents’ need for (in)validation, it has resulted in making parents feel as though they are always getting something wrong and the mistaken belief that there is ‘a way’ to raise a child.
Well, guess what? I grew up eating fruit and vegetables without pretence, getting verbal, not physical, rewards for good behaviour and taking my afternoon naps without any educational tapes in the background, and I’ve turned out … kind of OK. A parenting class would most likely result in the manufacturing of more fruitless and meaningless formulae, since to teach anything a bit of pattern and rigour is needed. And more rules are certainly not what parents need at the moment.
If there had to be some sort of formula to parenting, it would be a very simple one: ‘expression, not compression’. Children need stimulation, autonomy and a space to find and pursue their passions. This is something which cannot be dictated by rules and cannot be taught by classes. Least of all, classes run by a state which is systematically failing millions of children l
Notes
1. www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-families-are-the-key-to-ending-poverty.
2. www.theguardian.com/money/2013/mar/24/free-parenting-classes-scheme.
3. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-32075251.
4. www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/statistics.